Hops and Marijuana Are Close Relatives
Over the last five years, India Pale Ale’s or IPAs have become one of the most popular styles of craft beer on the market. IPAs are heavily hopped beers that were developed by the British for export to warm parts of the world in the early 1700s. Their flavors are dominated by the taste of hops and many people become “addicted” to the heavy hops in IPA.
Back in the 1700s, the British exported other types of beer to places like India, but the beers got warm down in the hulls of the old wooden sailing ships and bacteria ruined the brews. They found that adding more hops to the beer inhibited bacteria and the beers arrived ready to drink rather than ready to pour into the harbor.
The popularity of this style of pale ale has tracked the huge upsurge of the legal marijuana market in the Western US. It is no surprise then that hops, the key ingredient in IPA, is a very close botanical relative to marijuana. If you’ve ever been to a brewery and smelled the barrels full of hops pellets before they are added to the mash, you know the smell is almost identical to the smell of a fresh bag of marijuana.
Hops and marijuana are two members of the Cannabaceae, or hemp family. Botanists look closely at plants and organize them into families. All the members of a plant family have extremely similar flowers which are the sexual organs of the plants. Other details of the plants in a family may vary widely but the flowers will be very similar. Thus it turns out that the flower of the marijuana plant and the hops plant are very similar in terms of the details of the flower anatomy and they are the only two members of their little genus.
Most members of the marijuana branch of the hemp family are used for making rope but some (Cannabis sativa) has been bred for psychoactive properties and have been regulated after 1950s conservatives concluded that marijuana was turning youth into communists. The industrial hemp industry in the US was ruined by this regulation even though you could smoke industrial hemp until you ruined your lungs without getting a “high” from it.
But we digress. Hops are even more interesting than hemp and have been legally bred for centuries because the sharp flavor of their dried flowers is an excellent counter balance to the sweetness of fermented grains in beers. As mentioned hops also kills bacteria that can ruin a beer and make it taste bad. So hops are used to balance the flavor of beer, adding bitterness to counter the inherit sweetness of the malt and grains.
Hops flowers have a gooey resin called lupulin containing acids and essential oils that are full of flavor and biocides. If you handle a fresh flower of marijuana and a fresh flower of hops, both are sticky with resins and this stickiness is where the magic of the plants reside.
Hops have more than 400 aroma compounds that reside in the flowers. You can smell some when you smell the hop flower but others are only released when the hops are boiled and then fermented and others only come out when the hop residue in the beer hits your tongue.
Beer is very place-oriented and hops grown from the seeds of the same plant will taste different if grown in different places. So the hops absorbs the character of the place where it grows. And beers absorb the character of the place where they are brewed for mysterious reasons.
In New Mexico you will find hops growing wild out in the woods. Hops is common in the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos or in the mountains above Santa Fe. These are not plants escaped from a nursery but rather are native varieties of the hops. If you are home brewing, you might carefully collect the flowers of these wild hops and see what you can do with the subtle flavors.
A majority of hops sold to brewers in the US come from the Pacific Northwest where they grow on racks both in the Willamette Valley and east of the Cascade Mountains. Brewers know their hops and learn to mix specific varieties of hops to achieve the flavor they are looking for in a beer. Really high quality beers such as La Cumbre’s Elevated IPA or Ska’s Modus Hopperendi are good because the brew masters blend and balance the hops carefully. Some other brews have a harsh bitter flavor because the hop treatment is rudimentary. Some New Mexico breweries never get this right while others do very well with their hopping. And it seems that some of the older breweries in the state struggle with hopping while some of the newer breweries start off on the right foot.
Many beer styles have minimal hops in the brew such as pilsners and lagers. For people who appreciate the flavor of hops, it may be hard to appreciate these milder beers after you get attached to the rich floral character of hops in an IPA.
Try various IPAs and pay attention to the “hopiness”. Often beer labels will talk about the types of hops the brewer used but even if they don’t you may be able to identify the dominant variety of hops in various beers by taste over time.
We’ll dive into the hop topic more later.
